(2025-07-10) Routroy The False Gods Of Our Feeds

Rohan Routroy: The False Gods of Our Feeds. Ben Hunt: Rohan Routroy writes about myths, movies and meaning on Nothing In A Nutshell, which has become one of my favorite independent blogs (and hasn’t yet been swallowed by the Substack borg, not that there’s anything wrong with that). Rohan led Brand Strategy at Twitter back in the day, and he is the founder of Thirty Eight – a boutique consulting and design firm in NYC.

The truth is that irreligion is the opium of the people. Wherever the people do not believe in something beyond the world, they will worship the world. But, above all, they will worship the strongest thing in the world.
G.K. Chesterton

Rohan: I’ve been thinking about the role of social media in the decline of sacred attention and the rise of false idolatry in our culture. The more I reflect on it, the more I believe the two are linked.

If I had to name a starting point for when society began descending into a valley of screen driven loneliness, it would be the fall of 2006, when Facebook announced the News Feed. It was neither news, nor was it a feed. It was the end of the end. For the first time, media no longer had a conclusion.

This infinite scroll marked the beginning of our collective descent into the nothingness of internet consciousness.

We do not wake up to our own consciousness anymore. We wake up to content. Content that is specifically designed to farm our attention for something far deeper than entertainment.

Modern branding follows its cues from religion. Worship has merely been repackaged for the secular class, creating its own set of problems. Branding understands the same truth religion has for millennia. People seek belonging, meaning, and identity through metaphors and symbols

Before we go further, it’s worth pausing to define what I mean by God. Not in a theological sense, but as something more intrinsic. For the scope of this essay, God is the personification of the values we aspire to hold.

value systems contained in symbolic figures.

those values, in their symbolic form, once served as a moral architecture for civilization.

we find ourselves in the murky waters of the postmodern hangover: the belief that values are merely social constructs.

This ideology shares the same design flaw as the New Atheist movement. It is fair game to deconstruct, and in some cases destroy, the psychosocial scaffolding that has held societies together since we first worshipped the Sun.
But it is also fair to ask: what did they replace it with?

The answer is a void masquerading as progress. And by that, I mean a reductionist rejection of values, replaced by the nihilistic worship of strongmen and their impulses.

The section of society that falls prey to this is significant enough to affect all of us, from well-meaning atheists to devoted believers, all of whom still love their neighbors.

Dictators become the champions of power. Billionaires become the embodiment of money.... it is no surprise that the two strongmen of our times own the very platforms we impulsively scroll.

Contemplating our existential aloneness, and connecting with the vastness of our inner life, is an act of spiritual flourishing. Pulling out our phones when bored or lonely, filling up that silence with the gods in our feeds is a dangerous act of worshipping the nihilism within them.

with the old ways of processing our relationship to assumed gods, at least we had a chance at redemption. With the new gods – brittle strongmen, fickle influencers, and status addicts – we are flirting with the annihilation of our agency, and eventually, our sanity.

So where do we go from here?

To channel Marshall McLuhan, who warned us about this moment before we were ready to listen:
There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.

Our work is different. Our work is to become discerning individuals who choose what gets our attention. Not by escaping reality, but by learning how to be in it – attentively, and deliberately.

We begin by pausing the feed. We begin by taking sabbaths from the altars of our screens. We begin by remembering that attention is not a commodity. It is a sacrament.

What daily actions are a reflection of loneliness and distraction? And what daily actions reflect a conscious encounter with being alone?

This is not about rejecting technology. Phones can and will be a part of this conversation. Rejecting the infrastructures of our waking moments won’t find us peace, but deeply questioning our relationships with them might.

we may begin to shift the trajectory. From the subconscious worship of strongmen to the conscious worship of values that help us flourish.